Shadow Kind
They came from the Shadow Realm, but they blend in with the Mundane humans easily enough by claiming to be Little People. Even declaring themselves dwarves doesn't garner much attention and just gets them lumped in with the Little People. The majority of the dwarves were born in the Shadow Realm, but there are a handful that were born within the Mundane world.
Short and Stout
Bold and hardy, dwarves are known as skilled warriors, miners, and workers of stone and metal. Though they stand well under 5 feet tall, dwarves are so broad and compact that they can weigh as much as a human standing nearly two feet taller. Their courage and endurance are also easily a match for any of the larger folk.
Dwarven skin ranges from deep brown to a paler hue tinged with red, but the most common shades are light brown or deep tan, like certain tones of earth. Their hair, worn long but in simple styles, is usually black, gray, or brown, though paler dwarves often have red hair. Male dwarves value their beards highly and groom them carefully.
Long Memory, Long Grudges
Dwarves can live to be more than 400 years old, so the oldest living dwarves often remember a very different world. This longevity grants them a perspective on the world that shorter-lived races such as humans and halflings lack.
Dwarves are solid and enduring like the mountains they love, weathering the passage of centuries with stoic endurance and little change. They respect the traditions of their clans, tracing their ancestry back to the founding of their most ancient strongholds in the youth of the world, and don’t abandon those traditions lightly. Part of those traditions is devotion to the gods of the dwarves, who uphold the dwarven ideals of industrious labor, skill in battle, and devotion to the forge.
Individual dwarves are determined and loyal, true to their word and decisive in action, sometimes to the point of stubbornness. Many dwarves have a strong sense of justice, and they are slow to forget wrongs they have suffered. A wrong done to one dwarf is a wrong done to the dwarf’s entire clan, so what begins as one dwarf’s hunt for vengeance can become a full-blown clan feud.
Clans
Dwarves are a people of clans. While they left their clans behind in the Shadow Realm, they have not left the desire to amongst clansmen. Thus, they gather in groups and create new clans when they are able to do so. When they are unable to find other dwarves to gather with or their are not enough to establish a new clan, they will generally gather a group of mixed races that will serve the same purpose for them as a clan. If no other option is available to them, they will join a group of the Mundane and claim that as their clan.
They are just as loyal to these adopted, new clans as they were to the people of their blood back in the Shadow Realm. Because of this, many dwarves feel conflicted and feel that they are living in two worlds with no way to resolve the issue. Now that they are a member to a new clan, should they go back to their previous clan if an option to return to the Shadow Realm presented itself?
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